LITMIR.BIZ

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to Morgan. The dwarf was already dancing down the long hallway in the direction of the single open door at the end of the passage. “Miss Twittingdon is waiting for you. But don’t mind her—she’s an inmate, if you take my meaning.”

      “She’s one of the loonies, ye mean,” Peaches—whose steps had slowed as she gained the hallway—said, her usually booming voice lowered to a whisper. “And what would ye be, Ferdie, iffen ye don’t mind me askin’?”

      Ferdie pulled himself up to his full height, which brought him just past the bottom button of Morgan’s waistcoat, and announced:

      “All men are measured alike in the eyes of God;

      but a father’s vanity gauges with a different rule.

      A mother’s love protects while she has life,

      but once she is gone, naked hatred runs rife.

      Hide him away, secrete the embarrassing Haswit.

      Remove him, forget him, brand him a half-wit!”

      Morgan looked down at Frederick Haswit, really looked at him for the first time, and felt a twinge of guilt. He had dismissed the youth, who looked to be at least in his late teens, as being faintly feebleminded merely because of his size, assuming that Ferdie was incarcerated at Woodwere because that was where he should be. Granted, the fellow was vaguely eccentric, spouting bad poetry at the drop of a hint, but did he really need to be hidden from the world, locked away from a normal life?

      “Haswit. You can’t be Sir Joseph’s son, can you, Ferdie?” Morgan heard himself inquiring, not realizing that he had come to that conclusion until he spoke the question aloud. “Sir Joseph Haswit. As I recall, he resides in London year-round and is known to be a childless widower.”

      Ferdie’s expression was painful to see. “As he sees it.”

      “I’m sorry,” Morgan said sincerely. “We English can be remarkably cold bastards.”

      Ferdie tipped his great head to one side, and his painful grimace became a smile in earnest. “Not to worry. The world will come to an end in eight months anyway. Eight months, three weeks, and four days, to be completely precise about the thing. Nobody can stop it. Everything has to balance out.”

      Peaches backed up until she was pressed against Morgan’s side. “More’n a few slates offa this one’s roof, yer worship, and don’t ye know,” she whispered to him out of the corner of her mouth. “If it’s wantin’ me ye’ll be, I’ll be in the coach, m’shiverin’ body stuffed under the lap rug, and mumblin’ a prayer ta the Virgin—iffen I can call one ta mind.”

      Morgan grabbed hold of Peaches’s elbow as she attempted to back toward the staircase. “In eight months, you say, Ferdie,” he said calmly. “You seem very precise about that. I wonder why.”

      “Eight months, three weeks, and four days. And why not?” Ferdie answered, evading Morgan’s searching look. “June 7, 1816. It’s as good a day as any to die.”

      “I imagine you might have a point there, Ferdie,” Morgan said consideringly, remembering the horror in his uncle James’s eyes as that man had gasped for his last breath. “I doubt the day matters much to a dying man. It’s only what that man may have done while alive that puts the fear of the Hereafter into him.”

      “The dear Christ preserve us, and it’s as queer as Dick’s hatband ye are, the both of ye!” Peaches exclaimed in high hysterics, pulling against Morgan’s grip on her arm, her eyes wide with fear. “Caroline! Caroline! Where be ye, gel? And it’s a pair of bleedin’ madmen ye should be savin’ yer dear Peaches from, don’t ye know! Where are ye, Caro?”

      “Peaches! Is that you? Oh, Peaches—I can’t believe it!”

      Morgan looked down the hallway, following the sound of the female voice calling out the Irishwoman’s name, to see a thin snip of a girl dressed in little more than rags barreling at him full tilt, her well-shaped legs bare nearly to the knee.

      Behind her, standing tall in the doorway, appeared a woman dressed from head to foot in brightest scarlet. “Dulcinea!” she cried, bracing her hands against either side of the door frame as if an invisible Something were keeping her from taking so much as a single step into the hallway.

      “Caroline, you bacon-brained besom!” Ferdie shouted, beginning to jump up and down in obvious fury. “Her name is Caroline!”

      “Silence, you doomsday Lilliputian! Dulcinea! Come back to me at once, you impulsive child! How many times must I tell you that well-bred young ladies don’t—Oh, pooh!”

      As Ferdie unleashed a badly metered poem pointing out the flaws inherent in “batty biddies” who believed themselves better than they should be, and as the lady in scarlet stared owlishly at Morgan, then took a single step backward, to begin adjusting her slipping turban as if suddenly realizing she was in the presence of Somebody Important, and as the little blond waif and the weeping Irishwoman fell on each other’s necks, Morgan Blakely, Marquis of Clayton, searched in his pockets for a cheroot, which he stuck, unlit, into his mouth before leaning against the wall, an island of contemplative calm in the middle of the raging storm.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child.

      John Dryden

      CAROLINE SAT perched on the window seat, the index finger of her left hand to her mouth as she absentmindedly worried at the already badly chewed nail, watching the handsome, impeccably dressed Marquis of Clayton as a bird might watch a snake sliding through the tall grass.

      His hair was as dark and glossy as the bottom of a wet wooden bucket, and his heavily hooded eyes were blacker than a stormy night. He had the smooth, tanned complexion of a man who saw the sun much more often than she did, and she removed her finger from her mouth to gaze down at her own too pale skin, whose only color stemmed from the chilblains spiderwebbing her hands and fingers.

      Her intensive scrutiny, which had also taken in the vertical slashes in his high-boned cheeks—lines that spoke of a man who kept a tight rein on his emotions—his aristocratic nose, his beautiful, clean white teeth, and even the fact that his shoulders were as wide as his long legs were straight, concluded with a visual inspection of his clothing.

      He was dressed all in midnight-blue, his linen snowy and exquisitely starched, and the ruby winking in the folds of his cravat tempted her to mentally cipher how many pairs of wooden clogs the stone would fetch for the inmates on the public side if she could just lift it from his person and take it to Seth Bosley, a storekeeper in the village who was not averse to dealing in such questionable transactions.

      Not that she’d ever try such a thing. Peaches had taught her well, and Caroline had needed no more than one look to conclude that the Marquis of Clayton was no easy mark. The smartest way to deal with a man like him was not to deal with him at all.

      “More tea, my lord?”

      Caroline smiled as she watched Miss Twittingdon lift the crude jug and pretend to pour tea into the chipped tooth glass she had pressed on the marquis once the commotion in the hallway had fizzled to a stop and they had all adjourned to the old woman’s room.

      “Thank you, no,” the man who had introduced himself as Morgan Blakely, Marquis of Clayton, replied, setting the glass on the tabletop. “I’ve had quite enough. And I must say, the cucumber sandwiches were extremely pleasing. It is always pleasant to indulge oneself in a hearty repast after a day’s journey, especially at this time of year.”

      “And it’s clear as day that the man’s ta let in his attic,” Peaches whispered to Caroline, as the Irishwoman was sitting close beside her on the window seat. “I ain’t seen hide nor hair of any sandwiches—just them plates with spools of thread plopped on ’em.”

      “It’s how we practice serving tea,” Caroline whispered back at her. “Sometimes Aunt Leticia gets confused. What I fail to understand is why our gentleman

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